Imperialist Chief Obama:Deeper Into
the Quagmire Defeat U.S. War on
Afghanistan and Iraq!On
December 1, President Barack Obama officially
announced a massive escalation of the U.S. war
on Afghanistan, tripling the number of American
military personnel there since Obama took
office. This move marks a decision by Washington
to continue the colonial occupation of
Afghanistan indefinitely, and with it the bloody
slaughter of the Afghan people. Obama’s claim
that he would “begin the transfer” of U.S.
forces by mid-2011 was just sucker bait for
gullible liberals. “Afghanistan Is Now Obama’s
War,” proclaimed the media from New York to
London to Mumbai. But Afghanistan has been the
Democrats’ war since the moment it was launched,
in September 2001, and together with the war on
Iraq, it is a bipartisan imperialist war. No one
in Washington thinks the Afghan puppet army will
be able to handle the Taliban. The actual U.S.
strategy is not to defeat the Taliban but to
weaken it enough so that elements of the
Islamists can be brought into a political deal.
It is striking that in the United States, a
majority of the population is turning against
the war even though there hasn’t been a major
national antiwar march in more than two years –
ever since the start of the last presidential
election campaign. At protests following Obama’s
announcement of more troops to Afghanistan,
organizers carefully avoided any signs
mentioning the president by name. Our
Internationalist contingent, in contrast,
carried signs including, “Hey Obama, How Many
Kids Did You Kill Today? Defeat Imperialist
Slaughter in Afghanistan, Iraq.” Defeat
U.S.
War on Afghanistan and Iraq!

Popular Front Diverts
Workers into Legalistic Dead-EndLife and Death
Struggle for Independent Unions in
MexicoThe
Mexican
government of President Felipe Calderón has
launched a war on labor that is likely to be the
key battle for the existence of unions
independent of government control. On October 10
police and army troops seized the generating
plants and other installations of the
state-owned Luz y Fuerza del Centro electrical
power company. The president issued a decree
liquidating the company and firing all 44,000
employees belonging to the Mexican Electrical
Workers Union (SME). Calderón
wants to imitate Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the
air traffic controllers strike in 1981 and
Margaret Thatcher victory over the British coal
miners union in 1985. By
October 15, well over 300,000 poured into the
streets and crowded into the Zócalo, the
capital’s main plaza to defend the SME. The
Grupo Internacionalista has called to prepare a
general strike in central Mexico in defense of
the SME. But
while union leaders sometimes talk of strike
action, they are following a dead-end strategy
of appealing to the bourgeois courts and
Congress. Now the cause of the electrical
workers has been added to the popular front
around Andrés Manuel López Obrador,
ex-presidential candidate of the bourgeois
nationalist PRD, who is looking to the 2012
elections. For electrical workers to win they
must break with all the bourgeois parties and
politicians. Key is to build a
revolutionary workers party. Life
and Death Struggle for Independent
Unions in Mexico

Appeals to Obama’s Top
Cop Eric Holder Spread Deadly IllusionsMumia’s Life Is On
the Line: Mobilize Labor/Black Power to
Free Him Now!The
threat to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life is increasingly
ominous. His lead attorney, Robert Bryan, warns:
“There is an escalated effort by the authorities
to see him die at the hands of the executioner.
This is the most dangerous time for Mumia since
his 1981 arrest.” The U.S. Supreme Court has
turned down Jamal’s two appeals. If it were to
rule in favor of the prosecution’s
appeal, this would open the way for Pennsylvania
governor Ed Rendell to issue a third warrant of
execution, which he has vowed to do. Contrary to
the misplaced expectations of many, the Obama
administration is not about to save Mumia. Around
the world, hundreds of thousands have marched
for this courageous champion of oppressed.
Trade unions representing millions of members
have rallied to the defense of Mumia. It is
urgent to expand this support into powerful
labor/black action, appealing to the
integrated union movement to join with the
black, Latino and immigrant poor to demand
that he be liberated. Mumia’s
Life
Is
On
the
Line: Mobilize Labor/Black Power to
Free Him Now!

Honduras: Sweep Away the
Coup Plotters, Generals and Capitalists –
Fight for a Workers and Peasants Government!For
Revolutionary Workers Struggle
Against Coups in Central AmericaThe
civilian-military coup d’état of June 28
unleashed a nightmare for the Honduran masses,
and not just for them. It threatens all
of Latin America with a return to the times of
the military dictatorships, of the dirty wars
and the death squads of the 1970s and ’80s.
Despite the denials by U.S. spokesmen, this
coup was “made in U.S.A.” The question that is
posed is how to eradicate this plague that has
beset Latin America for decades. To suppose
that the solution is to be found in merely
reestablishing “constitutional order” by
restoring President Zelaya, or even that it
can be resolved in a bourgeois-democratic
framework, is to ignore the class forces which
produced the coup, as well as the web of
complicity extending from Tegucigalpa to
Washington, D.C. Historically, left-wing
forces in Central America have been dominated
by a nationalist vision and politics, but only
through international
socialist revolution is it possible to
eradicate the threat of constant coups, which
are inherent in Latin American capitalism
under imperialist domination.For
Revolutionary
Workers
Struggle
Against
Coups
in Central America

Now
It’s Official: U.S. Backs Coup Regime – A
Threat to All Latin AmericaHonduras After the
Phony “Election”:More
Repression and ResistanceOn
November 29, the authors of the
civilian-military coup d’état who seized power
in Honduras five months earlier held a
plebiscite-style pseudo-election accompanied by
massive repression designed to legitimize the
dictatorship. In the poor barrios of the capital
Tegucigalpa and major towns and in the
countryside, the call “don’t vote” was widely
followed and people massively stayed home. Since
then there has been a wave of disappearances and
murders of resistance activists. The death
squads are back. Despite the bloody repression,
the groups leading the resistance to the coup
regime vowed to continue the struggle. However,
even though it was based in the trade unions,
peasant organizations, women’s and gay rights
groups and organizations of indigenous peoples
and the black Garífuna population, politically
this movement was tied to Zelaya and other
bourgeois politicians and parties. Although the
Resistance Front declared this “chapter” of the
struggle closed, it is wedded to popular-front
bourgeois politics, such as its call for
“participatory democracy” through a constituent
assembly. The League for the Fourth
International has called throughout for
independent labor mobilization to defeat the
gorila (reactionary militarist) coup, and for a
revolutionary workers party to lead the fight
for a workers and peasants government.
Honduras
After the Phony “Election”: More
Repression and Resistance

“Dialogue” with the Coup
Regime and Its Yankee Godfathers Is a TrapThe San
José-Tegucigalpa Accord: No to the
Imperialist Edict!The
San José-Tegucigalpa Accord, supposedly the
result of “dialogue” between
representatives of Honduran president Manuel
Zelaya and the puppet “president” of the coup
regime, Roberto Micheletti, is actually an
imperialist diktat. Zelaya’s supporters hailed
the signing of the Accord as a victory. This is
a major error: not only did it mean dropping the
demand for a constituent assembly, one of the
key issues that touched off the coup, but it
also requires signers to denounce “any sort of
demonstrations opposed to the elections or their
result, or which promote insurrection.”
This agreement does not mean the restoration
of “constitutional order,” and even less does
is it a victory for “democracy”; rather, it is
a victory for the blood-soaked coup plotters.
At the present time it is necessary to unmask
the electoral farce of the coup regime: to the
extent possible, it would be appropriate to
call for an active boycott to prevent the
electoral farce. A paramount task,
particularly outside Honduras, is defense of
the resistance fighters against the deadly
repression. The
San José-Tegucigalpa Accord: No to the
Imperialist Edict!

Drive Out All the
Imperialists!

Afghan Massacre Blows
Apart German Occupiers’ LiesIn the early morning hours of September
4, the German Bundeswehr commander in Kunduz, in
northern Afghanistan, ordered U.S. fighter jets
to carry out air strikes on two hijacked jet
fuel tankers bogged down in the sand of a river
bed where local villagers had gathered to siphon
off precious fuel. At least half of some 140
victims who were burned alive in the fireball
created by blowing up the tankers were
civilians. Despite the best efforts of the
government parties and much of the opposition in
the German Bundestag (parliament) to bury the
issue, it wouldn't go away. So almost three months
later, the former German war minister, the head
of the Bundeswehr and a state secretary were
forced to resign, sacrificed in the government’s
creeping cover-up of Germany’s biggest massacre
since the end of World War II.
Afghan
Massacre
Blows
Apart German Occupiers’ Lies

Massacre
in
MaguindanaoWarlords, Clan
Wars and Capitalist Rule in
PhilippinesOn
November 23, some 57 people including women and
journalists were massacred in the province of
Maguindanao on the southern Philippines island
of Mindanao, as a result of a feud between two
rival political clans that run neighboring
states. Both are supporters of Philippine
president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The horrific
massacre sent shock waves through the islands.
It was the biggest election-related massacre in
the history of the Philippines as well as the
largest number of journalists (18) killed in a
single event. Ascontroversy wouldn’t die down,
on December 5 Arroyo placed the province under
martial law. Soldiers discovered an arms cache
with enough weapons for a military brigade. It
was well-known that the military armed local
clan militias to back up its brutal offensive
against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF). The Philippine army is accompanied in
the area by a 600-soldier U.S. counterinsurgency
force. The League for the Fourth International
calls on the workers movement to demand the
immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces and
agents from the Philippines, to oppose the
martial law imposed in Maguindanao province, to
demand the withdrawal of the Philippine armed
forces from the contested southern areas, and to
defend the Bangsamoro people and their right to
self-determination. Warlords,
Clan
Wars
and
Capitalist Rule in Philippines

Mobilize Workers’
Action to Defend Bangsamoro Peoples’
Struggle!Drive
Out All U.S. Imperialist Troops and
Agencies!Philippine
Government
Launches New War on Muslim
GroupsWar officially
came to southern Philippines again as
the government of Gloria Macapagal
Arroyo unilaterally put an end to eleven
years of negotiations with the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)
September 3. A month early the
government abruptly broke off talks with
the MILF on the eve of signing an
autonomy pact. There are numerous
reports of U.S. Special Forces
accompanying Philippines Army units on
their deadly sweeps in the Bangsamoro
(land of the Moro people) region. More
than 100 people have been killed so far
and
half
a
million
refugees
have
fled
from
the fighting. Bourgeois liberals and the
petty-bourgeois left lamely call on the
government to resume the “peace
process,” which in any case was only
intended to wear down the insurgents.
Revolutionaries instead seek to mobilize
Philippine workers to drive out all U.S.
forces, whatever their legal status; to
force the withdrawal of the AFP from the
contested southern areas; and to defend
the Bangsamoro people and their right to
self-determination..
Philippine
Government Launches New War on Muslim
Groups(13 September
2008)

Drive
Out the MINUSTAH! Workers to Power!Haiti: Battle Over Starvation
Wages and Neocolonial OccupationHaiti,
home of the first successful slave revolution in
history, has for most of its independent history
been condemned by the workings of the capitalist
system to a threadbare existence of grinding
poverty. For years, the only images of Haiti
have been of sheer desperation. But Haiti does
have a working class, and in August these
workers fought an important battle against
starvation wages. In the end, the Haitian
parliament rejected the call for a US$5 daily
minimum wage in the face of opposition by the
president and industrialists. It was a bitter
defeat for the first major working-class
mobilization under the U.N. occupation. But
workers confronted the peacekeeping”
troops of the MINUSTAH who act as
mercenaries for U.S. imperialism. The Brazilian
military has carried out massacres in Haiti with
the same “counterinsurgency”
tactics it uses in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
Meanwhile, in the neighboring Dominican
Republic, racist violence against Haitians is
mounting, including lynchings. The U.S. and
Brazilian sections of the League for the Fourth
International have been active defending Haitian
workers in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.Haiti:
Battle
Over
Starvation
Wages
and Neocolonial Occupation

Courageous
Strikers
Could Have Won – Class-Struggle Leadership KeyLessons of the Battle for Stella
D’oroAfter
a struggle lasting more than a year, the mainly
immigrant workers at the Stella D’oro bakery in
the Bronx, New York lost their jobs in early
October [2009], when the owners closed the
plant. The 15-month struggle at this small
factory became a cause célèbre because it
symbolized workers’ endurance and courage in
defense of the most basic rights of labor. As
the fight grew ever more bitter, conflicting
strategies and political conceptions were
brought to the fore. The closing of the plant
was a real defeat for the labor movement as a
whole. But the Stella D’oro strike could have
ended in victory – and the company’s plan to
break the union and then to shut down the plant
could have been stopped. To do this would have
required a massive mobilization of labor’s
power. Instead, the labor bureaucrats let
these courageous workers go it virtually alone,
because of the union leaders’ subordination to
the bosses’ rules, institutions and parties.
Many left activists who participated in strike
support activities tailed the union misleaders’
losing consumer-boycott “strategy,” with the
usual popular-frontist rhetoric about how “the
people united will never be defeated.”
Internationalist Group supporters instead worked
intensively among area unionists with the call
for using labor’s muscle to get the scab
products off the supermarket shelves and to
block the flow of products into the struck
plant. Lessons
of
the Battle for Stella D’oro(November 2009)